Sunday, December 16, 2007

Danger Crane (249)

The idea came to him late one night as he sat alone watching infomercials about wonder tapes, magic creams, miracle paints, and sensational knives.
The Danger Crane.
It didn’t take long for him to craft the initial plans for the project. He worked non-stop for two weeks laying out the blueprints for what would definitely be something special.
It wasn’t difficult to find the time to work. He had been laid off from his job as a cafeteria worker and had gone on a tour of colleges up and down the east coast performing as a puppeteer. Through those puppets, named Carlos and Tigra respectively, he delivered messages of tolerance, acceptance, and sexual freedom.
After the shows he’d have sex with as many of the wide-eyed college students as he possibly could.
It wasn’t even about sex, not really. He found it completely insane how many of these young women would sleep with a stranger based simply on the fact that he’d shown up at their school for one evening and did a few funny voices while crouched behind a canvas and pvc pipe stage in the commissary, cafeteria, of student lounge. The message that he was delivering wasn’t even his own. He’d signed up for the job after he was laid off, and gotten a call late one Sunday afternoon. It was a very easy gig. They provided him with the script which he memorized immediately, a map of schools and dates, paid for his travel expenses, paid for his hotel room, and wired him a check every week.
But none of that mattered. He’d do the 45 minute show, then breakdown the stage which took another 15 minutes. As soon as he was done, he’d almost certainly find a group of students waiting to talk to him. And he would talk- he found their interest in his stupid puppet show to be quite uplifting. And after a few hours of talking, he’d be left with the one girl that had decided that she was going to sleep wit him that evening.
He slept with girls that he’d normally never have any interest in, but only because it was being offered. He slept with girls that wore flip-flops with jeans and walked on the backs of the cuffs until they were ragged and dirty. He slept with girls that added extra syllables to the ends of their words so that “No” became “No-ah”. He slept with girls who it seemed really had no real concern about anything he said but were only waiting to speak.
And the things they spoke about were boring, tedious, and almost not worth the effort. They discussed their friend’s sex lives and their own fights with their stepparents and their cousin’s abortions.
They tried to convince him that they were crazy party girls with little disregard for what people thought about them, but he could tell that it was all an act for his benefit.
He found their exploits sad, their behavior even sadder, but he slept with them anyway.
They always wanted his number and he’d always give it. Some would actually call for a few weeks. The road was lonely, even with all of the one night stands, so he’d gladly talk to them. Eventually the calls would stop. He figured that the only reason they’d made the attempt to begin with was to try and fool themselves into believing that they hadn’t just been in a one night stand with a traveling liberal puppeteer. Maybe the calls meant that there was an actual relationship.
When the tour was over he moved into his parent’s basement for a while. It wasn’t the best situation, but it would do until he figured out what to do with himself.
So he sat in the basement collecting unemployment checks and waiting for an idea to hit him, and one night it did.
The Danger Crane.
Before the Danger Crane idea came along, he’d been blocked. He could think straight after the tour. The life on the road hadn’t offered him the tales and experiences that he’d hoped. All he was left with were memories of the now nearly faceless cavalcade of coeds he’d done things to in cheap hotels up and down the coast, and a sense that he would never accomplish anything meaningful.
But the Crane was something special. It was to be the way that he got into the game. When he finished the blueprints, he mentioned the project to a few people in hopes that they’d be willing to take part in his plans.
This proved to be a misstep.
Things were running smoothly at first until his associates began to assume that they knew more about Cranes than they actually did.
It didn’t take long for everything to go down hill. So excited was he about the possibility of making something that mattered, he capitulated when he shouldn’t have.
He just wanted to build a quality Crane, but he’d gone about it the wrong way.
He wallowed in his disappointment and anger for quite sometime after the destruction of the Crane, and eventually began to put it behind him.
He started to call all those girls he’d met a few years back. He asked them why they’d been attracted to him and why they’d decided to sleep with him, a stranger, based only on his unenthusiastic puppet performances.
While each girl had a different answer, the gist was mostly the same.
Everyone wants a story.
Some people have lives that are full of events that are worthy of telling. Some people are constantly being thrust from anecdotal situation to anecdotal situation without a care in the world. But some people have to manufacture their colorful happenings. Some people have to sleep with a puppeteer just to have a story to tell.
He wrote about all of these instances about the girls looking for stories to tell.
The wizard never gave the tin man nothing that he didn’t already have, and our hero realized that he always had the stories.
He wrote about the cousins and stepmothers and everything else.
People read these stories and liked them. This was all he ever wanted.
Eventually, he even learned to love the mess that was the Danger Crane. It was designed with love, executed hurriedly, handled badly, and left to rot. But there was heart involved. And like anything with heart it would live again someday, if only as an excuse to tell a story.
There isn’t a moral or epilogue to all of this. I wish there was. All there is the small mark of a man that shard in loveless lovemaking, built a Crane that didn’t do exactly what it was supposed to, and somehow managed to make it all work out.
Hey, storytelling, like Crane building, is hard work. If it were easy everyone would do it.
Right?

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